A slim but worthy addition to the literature of terminal illness.
A sassy, brutally frank, and mercifully brief memoir of a British journalist’s 1997 decline and death by breast cancer, supplemented by e-mails and recollections from her family and friends.
At 32, a year after giving birth to twins, London Observer columnist Picardie discovered that a lump on her breast, previously diagnosed as a benign cyst, had become virulently malignant. Within months she learned that the cancer, which defied chemotherapy and less conventional treatments, had spread to her bones, lungs, and brain—and would soon kill her. After some soul-searching, she decided to write a column about her final days that would apply her flair for colloquial confession and shock humor (“you ram a carrot up the arse of the next person who advises you to start drinking homeopathic frogs urine”) to the messy agony of dying young. Expecting to be made thin by nauseating chemotherapy treatments, she was surprised when the steroids she was prescribed made her fat. Lashing out at patronizing acquaintances, clueless physicians, quack nostrums, and New Age gurus (referring to Andrew Weill, she snarls that “books by men with facial hair are not for me”), she finds solace in binge eating and spending lavishly on expensive makeup (“My non-beard book, Shop Yourself Out of Cancer, is coming soon”). So much fire-breathing sarcasm in the five short columns she managed to complete is balanced by confessions of terror, disgust, and lingering sadness (for herself and her children both) in various e-mails she exchanged with a female cancer sufferer and a man diagnosed with AIDS. Additional essays from her sister Justine and husband Matt Seaton portray Picardie as a complicated woman of uncommon brilliance and strength.
A slim but worthy addition to the literature of terminal illness.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6612-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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